Clara Immerwahr.
Clara Immerwahr was the first woman in Germany to be awarded a doctorate in Chemistry.
After her marriage, her husband, one of the world's great chemists, forced her to abandon research and assume a role as a housewife.
She shot herself in 1915 because she was a pacifist and her husband, Fritz Haber, was developing poison gas for the German army in World War I. The day after her suicide, her husband left for the front in France to supervise the first gas attack of World War I, thus precipitating a rash of chemical attacks on both sides.
In 1918, Fritz Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of nitrogen fixation, on which the world's food supply depends today.
Fritz Haber, although he had converted to Lutheranism to be "more German" and in spite of the fact that he was a right wing German nationalist was forced to emigrate to Switzerland when the Nazis assumed power because he, like his wife, was born Jewish.
He died in 1934 in a hotel in Basel Switzerland.
Haber made important contributions to physical chemistry, including seminal work on the third law of thermodynamics, and a method of calculating lattice energy in ionic solids, with Max Born, today known as the Born-Haber cycle.
He was a great scientist, if not entirely a great human being.
Clara Immerwahr was a great human being. The world has missed her, even if she has been forgotten.
Clara Immerwahr:
= new reply since forum marked as read
